by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched the first of three rock
’n’ roll movies I had just ordered from The Video Beat, a company that
specializes in selling this sort of material: Jamboree!, a 1957 teen film from Warner Bros. via the
independent Vanguard company, obviously aimed at competing with the rock cheapies Sam Katzman was making at
Columbia with D.J. Alan Freed (who popularized rock ’n’ roll and, in fact, came
up with the name — it was a way of getting rhythm-and-blues music before a
white audience and Freed got the term from the 1920’s blues song “My Daddy
Rocks Me with One Steady Roll”). For years movie studios had been convinced
that commercial recordings could not be used in film soundtracks because the
standards of sound quality on records were not as good as those on film, but
the advent of magnetic tape recording in the late 1940’s and its adoption by both record companies and film studios changed all that.
As a result, these movies could feature rock performers miming to their
commercial recordings and could be made cheaply because the studios didn’t have
to make fresh pre-recordings of the songs; all they had to do was cut licensing
deals with the companies that made the records, hire the artists to synch to
them, and they were on their way. To compete with the Freed movies and also
efforts from even cheaper studios, like the surprisingly good Shake,
Rattle and Rock from American International
in 1956 — which came off especially well because instead of plugging the rock
songs into a lumbering old-fashioned plot of romantic machinations among boring
middle-aged cast members, it made the social controversy surrounding rock ’n’
roll and the attempts of stuffy old “reformers” to suppress it the key dramatic
issue — Warners hired a group of rockers, semi-rockers and downright
non-rockers to supply the musical talent.
The plot, in case you cared, centers
around the efforts of managers Lew Arthur (Pete Pastene) and Grace Shaw (Kay
Medford, who’s actually pretty good within the sorry limits of the character as
created by writer Lenard Kantor — imdb.com credits producer Milton Subotsky
with having a hand in the script but the film itself credits Kantor solo and,
given how much better Subotsky’s script for the 1962 film It’s Trad,
Dad! is than this one, I’m inclined to
believe the credits) to promote their hot, new and decidedly non-rocking talents. Grace’s boy is Pete Porter (Paul
Carr), a boring Sinatra wanna-be, and Lew’s girl is Honey Wynn (Freda Holloway,
voiced by Connie Francis, who in the opening sequence when she’s auditioning
for a part in a Broadway show magically manages to bring her own echo chamber
with her). They discover a new song and take it to a record company, only the
songwriter wants it cut as a duet — they oblige, “Honey and Pete” become
America’s new singing sensations (their debut record is shown in a montage
sequence as it rises up the charts — only instead of a 45 rpm disc the clip we
see is an anachronistic one of a 78 on the Musicraft label, which went out of
business in 1949, eight years before this film was made) and fall in love with
each other off-stage as well as on. Only both Lew and Grace want to prove to
each other (they were formerly married, then divorced, and the antagonism that
split them apart originally remains) that their client can make it on his or
her own, so they sneakily trick Pete and Honey into recording solo discs.
Pete’s is a hit and lands him a job headlining at the London Palladium, but
Honey’s flops, she disappears and Pete mopes around because he misses her. In
the end, of course, Pete and Honey are reunited, Lew and Grace remarry (after
some nauseating dialogue about how unfulfilling Grace finds her success without
a man) and everything ends happily. One promotional stratagem Warner Bros. hit
on for this film is giving no fewer than 18 D.J.’s — including Dick Clark,
making his film debut — cameo roles in the movie, thereby ensuring that they
would promote the movie on their radio shows. Clark is about the only D.J.
represented here you’re likely to have heard of, unless you’re really up on 1950’s rock ’n’ roll trivia, but the wildest
one is Jocko Henderson, a man of indeterminate race (mainly because it’s hard
to see his face under the space helmet he wears) whom Charles joked came off as
a cross between David Bowie and Sun Ra.
There are basically four reasons to
bother with Jamboree — five if
you count Joe Williams, who sings a number with Count Basie’s band (out of all
the musical guest stars Basie is the only one who does more than one song,
about half of “One O’Clock Jump” as well as his vocal feature with Williams);
the others are Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins in one of his rare
film appearances. It’s a measure of how much Perkins’ March 1956 auto accident,
which laid him up for six months just as his song “Blue Suede Shoes” was
climbing up the nationwide charts, caused him to miss the brass ring that
Lewis, his Sun label-mate, is billed on the first of three big credit title and
Perkins is billed on the third one — but they both get about the same amount of
screen time (one song each). Perkins does “Glad All Over,” one of his few songs
from the period he didn’t write, but the people who did (Aaron Schroder — whose
name for some reason is given an umlaut on imdb — Sid Tepper and Roy Bennett)
caught his style and came up with a good enough vehicle for him it was one of
the six Carl Perkins songs covered by the Beatles. (The Beatles recorded more
Perkins songs — six — than they did by Elvis, two, and Buddy Holly, three, combined.) In their book on Sun Records, Colin Escott and
Martin Hawkins claim that Perkins had such a spectacular stage act that even
Elvis Presley didn’t want to go on after him, but what we see in this film is a
smooth but not that spectacular
set of stage moves that makes Perkins look more like a white Chuck Berry than a
second Elvis (and he’s homely enough that it’s clear why Elvis became a
superstar and Perkins didn’t). Jerry Lee Lewis gets to perform one of his best
songs, “Great Balls of Fire,” but his segment is handicapped by his discomfort
with lip-synching — when he went on American Bandstand to promote “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” he refused
to mime to his record and insisted on performing live (one of only six people
in the entire history of Bandstand
to do that), and it’s a pity he couldn’t have laid down the law with the
producers of Jamboree! the way he
did with Dick Clark and his
staff. Fats Domino does a not particularly distinguished (at least by his high standards) song called “Come What May” and
probably does the weakest job of lip-synching of anybody in the film — but he’s
got Cosimo Matassa’s great studio band from New Orleans behind him on screen as
well as on the soundtrack and, as always, it’s a great joy to see him even
though he was clearly having more fun (as well as getting better material!) in Shake,
Rattle and Rock.
Frankie Avalon makes his
film debut with “Don’t Want to Be Teacher’s Pet,” and while it’s hardly a patch
on the Lewis and Perkins numbers it is a bright, peppy little lite-rocker that’s actually better than most of
his subsequent material. Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen — who actually were members
of the same band, though they were promoted as solo artists — appear for some
decent pop-rock from Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis, New Mexico that was soon
to loose Buddy Holly on the world (and their styles are similar, only Knox and
Bowen — who recalled later that his career ended when the teenagers stopped
screaming during his performances and started realizing that he was singing
flat — are merely competent professionals and Holly was a genius). Lewis Lymon,
Frankie’s brother, shows up with a doo-wop group called, not the Teenagers, but
the Teenchords; he’s O.K. and it’s nice to know he had a considerably longer
and happier life than Frankie (he lived until July 2013!), but watching him is
like watching any of the male Jacksons other than Michael. Slim Whitman turns
up and sings a song in a surprisingly high voice. An alleged white rocker named
Charlie Gracie does a song called “Cool Baby” by Otis Blackwell, who’s credited
as the musical director on this film, but it’s clear writing for Elvis and
co-writing with Little Richard turned Blackwell on more than his duties here.
The plot is so dull, and the music roster is so choked with middle-of-the-road
acts, that Jamboree is even more
disappointing than most of the 1950’s rock movies; at least the Columbia films
had the ferocious on-screen energy of Alan Freed himself (in some ways he was
as much a “rock star,” in the modern meaning of the word, as the musicians he
promoted), and Shake, Rattle and Rock had a genuinely satirical plotline (including two former collaborators
of the Marx Brothers, Margaret Dumont and Douglass Dumbrille, among the oily
“reformers” trying to shut rock down), but Jamboree has little to offer aside from four (or five) of the
greatest rock and jazz musicians of all time.
